Views and reviews of over-looked and under-appreciated culture and creativity

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Re-paving Paradise in the O-Gauge Zen Garden (Part 2)

That side street was ready for renovation. And I knewjust how to do it.

As in the real world, the infrastructure on a train layout needs maintenance and upgrading in order to best serve its purpose (which in this case, is simply to give me a hobby unrelated to anything else I have to deal with). Initially, I used colored construction paper to represent the roadways on my O-Gauge Zen Garden, and that was fine.But time marches on, and the aging paper has warped and wrinkled. In Part 1 I shared one method I devised to replace the paper with something more closely resembling asphalt. But there was still a lot of roadway to replace, and so I tried another solution. Mini-highways offers an easy solution for long stretches of road. Their roadway comes with highway markings printed on it, and the back of the thickly-textured paper has cut lines printed at regular intervals. It seemed like a perfect solution, so I purchased a roll.

The roads must roll! For this project, I used Mini Highways No. 402.

Always measure before buying! It turned out that my main thoroughfare was wider than the paper. And since I had custom-built crossing ramps I was reluctant to change it. The Mini-highways road, however, turned out to be perfect for the side street.

A definite improvement. I'll need a barrier at the end of the road, but scrubbrush will do for now.

I simply cut the road to length, spread white glue thinly but generously across the back, and set it into place. I placed bricks on the roadbed to ensure it dried without wrinkling, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

For the main drag, I'll have to go back to the paint-on-cork board method, but should the layout expand, I have additional roadway ready and waiting.